Fattening floor tom theme?

[jmh]

I've got a tune with a floor tom section which I had panned L and whatever spread formed by that and the overheads was where is sits across the stereo. This is pretty much how I have always address the floor tom.

This particular song moves into a section where the drummer has a theme on tom that I want to push - but it was dominating the whole L waveform and I thought there must be a way to make the tom become bigger but still seem somewhat directional.

So far on the Tom track, I tried moving the balance toward center applied a post-fader low pass to the R side only (with nova). Set a prefade send to aux ->highpassEQ->delay->balanced_to_R.

I started with a 10ms delay - but that sounded a bit phasy and it got a bit better when I increased it. Been playing with all the parameters (the cut off frequencies are currently around 370) and it kind of works - but it doesn't sound quite as good as just having the tom ramming the one side.

I've heard this done on other songs and I'm sure there must be a method (or a plugin) to accomplish this. Any tips or ideas?

[Microstudio]

Have you tried to do a Side-Chain Comp on that tom with any frequencies that are competing with it?

[jmh]

Have you tried to do a Side-Chain Comp on that tom with any frequencies that are competing with it?

The mix is actually kind of lean in that part. When The tom part starts up (while panned to the Left) and it seems balanced properly in volume, the tom peaks are the loudest in the mix and the L tom peaks are many dB higher than what the kick peaks are at - and probably the highest in the whole tune - which is why I think it may be a problem.

It could try putting a limiter the tom track, and backing down the volume a bit - and get more of the tom out of the overhead in that section. Of course the difficulty is that it sounds right the way it is with the lopsided peaks...

Although now that I think on it, there is bass that I could try sidechaining (actually this is already happening on the kicks - but there is no reason I can't have another triggered). I'll have to watch the meter to see if it is hitting the red during bass notes.